It was great to see everyone at our CDNews Happy Hour last night. Though that was the first one in a year and half, we’ve resolved to do it on a semi-monthly basis from here on out. 

The crowd was great, about 50/50 split between CDNews old-timers who have been around since the beginning of the site, and several people who just moved into the neighborhood.

It takes events like that to remind me that not everything on the site is immediately self-explanatory. So here’s a recap of how CDNews works and what we’re all about:

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• CDNews is a community site! Anyone can sign up for an account, log in, and be able to post stories and other content to the site. Reader posts start off on the /stories page, and CDNews editors will promote many of those items to the front page based on content, page-views, ratings, and comments
• The rating system is a key tool. If you’re logged-in to your account, 4 or 5 stars to the content you really like, 1 or 2 stars to what you don’t care for, and click “report abuse” on anything that is spam or has hateful or threatening content. We use ratings to help us choose what to promote to the front page, so be sure to rate what you like so we’ll know what is important to the community.
• Registered users can also post events to the community calendar, create business reviews, and post in our classifieds area.
• The staff behind CDNews is small and efficient. It’s me, the editor/publisher, and starting this month we’re bringing on seadevi as a paid contributor to cover neighborhood culture and other activities. About 30% of our stories come from people out in the community, and we depend on your participation to get a more diverse set of voices on the site.
• CDNews is supported by advertising from neighborhood businesses. Anyone can create their own ad using our self-serve system, or contact our sales guy Eric at [email protected]. As advertising revenue grows, we’ll use that to bring more paid contributors onto the site.
• This isn’t our full-time job. CDNews started off as a beta site for Neighborlogs, a software platform we’re building that allows anyone to build and manage their own neighborhood news community.

So thanks to everyone being a part of CDNews. And if you’ve so far only been a reader, we’re looking forward to you getting more involved by commenting or creating full posts on the site.